"Coach asked if we had a championship mentality. We went out and proved it," Garner said. "We did everything we had to do."

The Bulldogs may have done it too well. Now Secor is worried about a letdown.

"One win isn't going to win the league," he said cautiously. "We're in first place alone, but we're going to get everybody's best."

He knows Summerfield probably won't duplicate what it did during a 24-point fourth quarter when it turned a close game into a rout. The Bulldogs were 8-for-10 from the floor and 7-for-10 at the foul line after leading 44-39 early in the period.

"It would be nice if we could play that way for 32 minutes," Secor said.

He is a Summerfield graduate who has won the league as a player and coach.

"When we won it before, we had that lock-down defense like we had tonight. We really got after them," Secor said.

Typical was the defensive work VanKainen did on Lake, who had scored 28, 27 and 26 points in his last three games. He managed 8 Friday.

"We really worked on that," Secor said. "He's a great player. It's not like Whiteford hasn't had good point guards the last few years. We're used to defending them."

Austin Bischoff and Aaron Kellerbauer also had 8 points for Whiteford, which fell to 5-2 in the league and 7-3 overall.

"You have to hand it to Summerfield. They played a nice game," Whiteford coach Jim Ross said. "We shot poorly and they didn't do much wrong in the fourth quarter."

But Ross knows there is a long way to go in the league race.

"We're only halfway through (the league schedule). We've got them at home and there's a lot of parity. Someone else could get them," he said.

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